Taxonomy and Ontology Design Workshop Facilitation

Jump start your taxonomy efforts and understand your organization’s needs.

Taxonomy and Ontology Design and Implementation

Taxonomy experts evaluate your organization’s taxonomy maturity against your needs and equip you with the capabilities you need.

Taxonomy and Ontology Tool Selection and Integration

Discover the right tools to support scaled implementations and provide the most value to your business.

The Taxonomy Initiative was a great move forward. It did a couple of things. It showed that we could arrive at a uniform language, it showed that we can move the design into so many other taxonomies, which led to the larger platform migration engagement, having a valid taxonomy to rely on, just for communication purposes, or in my case to ensure that search is working properly or makes sense is huge! That capped off a lot of what we were trying to put in place to help people find the information they were looking for.
IT Director, Global Consulting Firm

EK’s core service offerings include harmonizing business vocabulary, taxonomy design, mapping business and process relationships, and ontology design. We possess unmatched expertise in taxonomy and ontology design and implementation, with a unique focus on designing for your specific users and businesses. Our taxonomy consulting services will allow you to capture, manage, and present information, products, and other digital media in a way that is intuitive to your users, ensuring the maximum success and value for your organization.

Information continues to grow at an exponential pace. Business taxonomy design is critical to ensure an organization can effectively capture, manage, and present this growing store of information. Taxonomies and ontologies serve not only to categorize content to improve findability (navigation and search), they also allow content to be discovered. As a result, organizational barriers will be broken down and information can be more effectively used and reused.

Taxonomy for your Organization

Taxonomies applied to intranets and internal knowledge bases result in enhanced information use and management, enterprise collaboration, and overall efficiency.

Taxonomy for your Customers

Taxonomies applied to external websites, particularly for retail or information delivery, result in greater customer satisfaction, lift, and conversion, which in turn leads to greater revenues.

Taxonomy for your Partners

Taxonomies designed to align language across multiple organizations result in greater efficiency, stronger collaboration, and the development of sustainable business processes.

Advance Your Taxonomy into an Ontology

The growing global interest in designing personalized user experiences, recommendation engines, natural language search, knowledge graphs, and the broader implementation of the semantic web continues to surface the demand for the creation and implementation of a complex information model. Ontologies offer a more flexible information architecture required to address advanced use cases.

Advanced Taxonomy and Ontology Use Cases
EK Can Help You Design Your Taxonomy and Ontology to Fit Your Advanced Taxonomy Use Cases

What We Do

  • Taxonomy and Ontology Design Workshop Facilitation
  • Taxonomy and Ontology Design and Implementation
  • Taxonomy and Ontology Tool Selection and Integration
  • Taxonomy and Ontology Governance and Maintenance
  • Library and Information Management Services

Our Approach

Taxonomy and Ontology Design Workshop Facilitation

Our taxonomy consulting experience has shown that many organizations struggle to get started with their taxonomy and ontology design efforts. Our proven methodology and workshop approach, successfully applied for over 300 organizations around the world, ensure a quick start and repeatable process that includes stakeholder buy-in for your organization. The taxonomy design workshop yields an understanding of an organization’s taxonomy needs, a “starter taxonomy” or “starter ontology” design, and an invested group of stakeholders to help carry the effort forward. EK’s taxonomy and ontology experts will:

  • Empower all participants with the technical information and real-world case studies need to drive a shared understanding, vision, and alignment behind the effort across the enterprise;
  • Engage stakeholders in a step-by-step process to build a starter model that follows system agnostic, standards-based information management practices, and can be integrated within your existing applications and processes; and
  • Facilitate prioritization activities to achieve a fully implementable and agile roadmap with a clear path forward on how to plan, build, and expand your foundational design.

Download our one-day taxonomy workshop flyer.

Taxonomy and Ontology Design and Implementation

We possess experience and expertise designing and implementing taxonomies for hundreds of organizations, spanning decades of experience and work on six continents for diverse audiences including government organizations, non-profits, and industries such as Finance, Retail, Pharmaceutical, Information Technology, Energy and Environment, and Legal.

EK leverages a combination of “top-down” and “bottom-up” design inputs to ensure we’re leveraging an organization’s existing materials and efforts, while directly engaging stakeholders and content owners to derive a taxonomy and ontology design that truly reflects the needs of the organization. A key differentiator for EK’s approach is our knowledge transfer and change management work to ensure the organization is invested with the understanding, education, and buy-in necessary to sustain and evolve the design over time.

Our proven methodology spans initial project planning and scoping, through use case definition, iterative design, implementation, tagging, testing and validation, operations, maintenance, and evolution. We ensure your organization obtains the taxonomy and ontology designs and capabilities they need, while equipping you for future needs as well.

EK’s taxonomy and ontology experts will:

  • Conduct a taxonomy/ontology audit to determine your organization’s maturity levels and determine gapps and requirements; 
  • Develop a phased implementation roadmap and plan with prioritized functional and technical requirements for phased implementation;
  • Rapidly prototype and show progress quickly to integrate with relevant content and data sources, enable taxonomy/ontology application, and facilitate ongoing simulation and validation; and 
  • Optimize long term use and adoption through incremental enterprise scale expansion, training, and upskilling of organizational users.

Download our taxonomy design flyer.

Taxonomy and Ontology Tool Selection and Integration

As the market leader in taxonomy and ontology design and implementation, EK works with the leading technologies, standards, and frameworks on the market. We have a complete understanding of the landscape of taxonomy and ontology management and application as well as the array of content management, document management, and enterprise search systems that possess this functionality to help your organization select the right tools and solution approach that will provide the greatest business value with the least administrative burden.

We are proficient in the installation, configuration, and integration of these systems, and also provide the necessary training, coaching, and support to ensure your organization can actively maintain and evolve these systems over time.

Taxonomy and Ontology Governance and Maintenance

EK provides end-to-end design and development capabilities that ensure continuity, reach-back, and integrity of our engagement, that is supported by deep technical implementation. This includes the assessment of taxonomy and ontology governance plans, often as an accompaniment to our implementation and ongoing support. EK has implemented taxonomy and ontology governance plans for a host of organizations, both as a component of a larger information initiative as well as an independent service offering.

We regard taxonomy governance as a central concept in any of our initiatives. Our governance plans guide both the sustainment and iteration of the overall system, organization structure, taxonomy/ontology application and tagging, and controlled vocabulary within it, as well as the content itself.

With our software development expertise, we can ensure our governance plans are written in the context of your chosen technology set and, moreover, we possess the capabilities to implement these designs directly for you. Critical to this implementation, is ensuring the governance is not onerous, but instead is easy to follow and clearly understood by those who will be asked to abide by it.

Library and Information Management Services

EK helps library and information centers modernize and transform how they deliver knowledge to their users through embedded expertise in Research and Knowledge Management, Integrated Library and Information Systems Services, and Library Administration.

For more information, visit our Library and Information Management Services page, or contact us today.

Results

Whether you’re seeking to refresh an existing taxonomy or ontology design, align multiple designs, or create and implement a new design, EK possesses the experience and expertise to ensure your efforts truly reflect the needs of your organization and end users. Our efforts will provide you with an intuitive and sustainable design that includes the flexibility necessary to adapt with the evolving needs of your organization.

With EK’s efforts, not only will you receive the taxonomy consulting services you need, you will receive the knowledge transfer, coaching, and change management necessary for your organization to truly own and evolve the taxonomy over time.

Put Taxonomy to Work for Your Organization Today!

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